


Textbook and Instinct

by Trojie



Series: The moment of truth in your lies [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Cunnilingus, Genderbending, Minor Violence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-10
Updated: 2010-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-13 14:38:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/138457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forgery isn't as simple as it looks. In which Eames doesn't need to know the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Textbook and Instinct

**Author's Note:**

> The other side of [Beyond The Physics Of It](http://archiveofourown.org/works/127257).

Mal’s dead.

It’s not a dream.

Arthur’s fingers, suddenly nerveless, manage to hang onto both phone and loaded die as he tells Cobb he’ll be there as soon as possible.

Charles de Gaulle to LAX takes eleven hours and thirty minutes, give or take. It’s 4am CEST here - 7pm PDT at Cobb’s end.

He makes some calls. His French, he knows, is good. _"Bonjour, je voudrais réserver un vol vers Los Angeles dès que possible ce matin."_ ; But Mal always told him he had no flair, in her gorgeous, accented English that he sometimes had to think through to follow. He’d rather be understood.

 _"Certainement, monsieur. Nous avons une place sur un vol au départ à midi."_ Noon at Charles de Gaulle. Eight hours. Too long. Too long to just sit here, anyway. He calls Heathrow. There are other airports, but he calls Heathrow, because at Heathrow everyone is in a rush and no-one will look at him, and no-one will wonder, and because he has to travel to get there, and right now, being on the move is the important thing. Arthur always feels more comfortable on the move, like he's doing something; he lives his life in flight mode.

 _’What’s the earliest flight you have a seat available on to LAX this morning?’_

 _‘I can get you a seat on the eleven am British Airways flight.’_ There are fewer pleasantries in English. Seven hours is better than eight, just. Arthur books the flight.

The Eurostar takes two and a half hours from the Gare du Nord to London St Pancras. Giving him four and a half hours to kill in London. Distantly he knows that there is something else he ought to be doing besides timetabling, but that’s somewhere on the outside.

He checks his die again. Still not a dream. He grabs his bag, the one he always has packed, and goes.

Mal Cobb is dead, and Dom Cobb is being questioned about her _murder_ , and Arthur is on the wrong side of the fucking world and he has seven hours before he can start to get there. He hates to wait, so he moves instead.

Metro to Gare du Nord. _'Un café s'il vous plaît'_. Gare du Nord to London St Pancras, overnight bag carefully stowed, PASIV case beside him. _’One coffee, please.’_

Tube to a location he promised himself he wouldn’t memorise. But he memorises them all, because he can’t help himself.

He has three and a half hours. The Heathrow Express from Paddington to the airport will take fifteen minutes. He has three hours, just to be safe.

He knocks.

Because he can’t say anything else - he can't tell the truth because Cobb probably doesn't want it noised around - he says ‘‘I’ve got a job. I need your help.’

Eames lets him in.

He wants to know who and where and why and what. Arthur doesn’t have the details because that would be lying and he’s not in the mood. ‘Just teach me,’ he says, and lays the PASIV out. ‘I have to be able to do this,’ he adds. ‘I have to be someone different.’

It’s not a lie, except by omission. Cobb didn’t tell him he could tell anyone else. Eames and Mal only met once that Arthur knows about. He’s not hurting anyone, he’s not lying. He’s learning a vital skill. He’s researching.

 _He’s escaping and denying and depersonalising and basically acting like a psychology textbook, actually, but the same textbook would tell him he’s entitled to, so he doesn’t care. He has time to kill - he might as well do something useful._

Eames guesses and interprets and squints at Arthur like he’s trying to read something off the underside of his soul, and after protesting that it doesn’t work like that, teaches him the Blonde Woman. Arthur has seen Eames use the Blonde Woman a lot, so Eames reasons that she should be familiar enough to Arthur for him to be able to get her.

Her name is Paula. She has three freckles like Orion's Belt on her left ankle, and her hair isn't naturally blonde but she goes to the best hairdressers to make sure most people never realise that fact.

Apparently Paula is good for pretty much any job Arthur might have in mind as long as the mark is male. And, as Eames points out, she looks nothing like Arthur, so recognition won’t be an issue.

Arthur doesn’t say that _he_ just doesn’t want to recognise himself. By that logic, the mark is male, anyway. He agrees to Paula because if he can concentrate, if he can shove everything else aside hard enough and well enough to be a woman, and one so utterly unlike him, well, that's the point, isn't it. Three hours of that, and then he can fold himself back into his life again and deal with it like a professional.

Three hours to get his head straight by getting out of it.

Around them is the quiet, angry noise of projections, which Arthur should be suppressing. He can't, though, not and concentrate on this at the same time. It's still quiet, is the point. They've got time. And Eames doesn't say a word about it, either, even when the explosions start.

Paula's reins are hard to grasp. Arthur doesn't understand her motivations, doesn't understand how to be that woman until Eames runs a hand through his own hair distractedly, frustratedly, because Arthur can hold the shape but every time he moves he drops it and he, Eames, just doesn't understand how to teach him, and Eames's shoulders ripple, and something inside Arthur shifts and suddenly their motivations align, suddenly he's her, and she knows what to do with that feeling, she knows what to do with Eames looking irritated and distracted. She knows what to do with men.

‘Remember what I told you,’ Eames says. ‘It’s the emotion, the mental presence, that’s important here. The mark’s mind can’t see the physical details - those are just for you, to remind yourself who you’re playing - he’ll feel them instead, he’ll see the person he’s expecting. The person who thinks like her.’

It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. The second Arthur starts thinking maybe this is a bad idea, he starts to slip, and his pride won't let him fail at this, so he goes with it. He folds a hand over Eames's shoulder and leans up.

‘Darling - ’ Eames's mouth is warm and reluctant, when Arthur kisses it. He presses into it, and Eames's hands come up around his waist, something between holding on and trying to steady them, a nice, stable stance.

Arthur's subconscious is angry, and the projections are getting closer. Arthur really couldn't give a flying fuck about that right now, though. He wants to take this further, prove that he can do it. Paula makes him push Eames back to the bed, back on the bed, and he starts to realise how forgery works.

The only way out is through.

Straddling Eames's lap, feeling the exact contour of his thighs through Paula's stockings, and the shape of his erection, and with that knowledge, that forgery has no compromise to it, Arthur understands for the first time what he's done here.

Eames's fingers are hot over the wrinkled, dragged-up fabric of Arthur's dress. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. There is a tiny worry wrinkle between his eyebrows.

‘This isn’t what Arthur would do right now,’ Arthur says. ‘So I want to do it.’ _Because I don't want to lose,_ he doesn't add. _Because I'm not going to be defeated by shape and psychology._ Because Arthur wants to do it but wouldn't, but Paula is indifferent to the idea and does it anyway. Because Arthur doesn't want to go back just yet.

Eames's eyes are dark and his expression guarded, his hips moving like he has no control over them, but he's holding something back. Arthur flexes these thighs he's wearing and rolls them over, gives Eames the reins so that Arthur doesn't need to concentrate on anything but feeling this. Eames doesn't do what Arthur expected he would do - instead, he slides himself down between Arthur's legs and settles with his ribs between Arthur's knees, rucking Arthur's skirt up and rolling his stockings down, pushing gently to part his thighs, spread them as wide as possible.

Paula doesn't wear any underwear, and that was an important detail earlier for various reasons but right now it's an important detail because it means that Eames can press a gentle kiss at the crease between torso and leg, and then -

And then, with tongue and fingers, he begins to test Arthur's grasp of forgery, Arthur's grasp of _reality_ , because it's slick and impossible, what he's doing, it's nothing like anything Arthur has felt before and it's true, forgery is about believing and about thinking and about mind trumping matter, because Arthur, though no stranger to female anatomy and what to do with it, and not without his own talents in that area, could never have imagined this, could never have built this sensation from nerve endings up even if he were given a map.

He arches under Eames's hands, and Paula likes a man to know she approves of what he's doing so Arthur is loud, her voice and her vocal chords announcing his intoxication with this, with Eames, and Eames just slides his tongue lower, parting the way so that his fingers can drive home, ground together inside Arthur as he realises the elasticity of these feminine muscles, learns to relax with two long fingers inside him and Eames's thumb gently stroking butterfly soft over his clitoris.

He holds the shape, holds Paula's reactions barely long enough to shake and stumble towards a climax, startled by a choked groan from Eames at one point and the sudden realisation that Eames has come in his pants, untouched, from this alone.

It's when Eames tries to put his arms around Arthur that he remembers what he was supposed to be doing here. What he's _done_. What's waiting for him in the world outside, and that is nothing Paula could ever understand, how this could be a mistake, and as he's hauling himself off the bed, away from Eames and his warmth and his comfort, the mask slips away.

Back in his own body, Arthur is still hard, still turned on by this, and he can't bear for Eames to see him like that, so he makes for the _en suite_.

It takes barely more than a stroke before he comes all over the vanity, avoiding his own gaze in the mirror. The riot is making the building shudder over and over, Arthur's projections rejecting the dreamscape and the ideas and the forgery and the falsity of it all.

One last fake won't hurt. Arthur's hand is steady when he holds it out, calm when he decides what he needs, and raises a Glock, which wasn't there before, to his temple.

Like tumbling off a building, he's back in his body, waking before he lands.

It's ten am. He packs up the PASIV, leaves Eames to sleep it off.

He texts his apology from the Heathrow Express, because Eames is going to find out sooner or later about the Cobbs, and he's going to put two and two together, and he shouldn't get it into his head that he took advantage of Arthur, when it was all the other way around.


End file.
